Honduras Elections, The Day after

We had elections here in Honduras yesterday, surprisingly the Opposition Alliance candidate is ahead in the vote count. I have written before that most probably elections would be rigged and of course they were, even now over 24 hours after the poll booths closed we only have results for 57% of the ballots, usually a couple of hours after the booths close the electoral body already announces the virtual winner, not this time.

How do you rig an election? Ok, one way is, the current president's party is a very well organized party, in our system we vote at the same time in three different ballots for president, mayor, and congressmen, the National Party (the President's party) is very disciplined, it is very unlikely that a member of this party would vote for a congressman or mayor of another party. The other two large parties don't have that attitude, they vote for whoever they want, because of this the Honduras congress always has more National Party members.

Now here is one example of one of the cunning things these guys did yesterday, the elections started at 7:00 am and the booths close at 4:00 pm. Now Hondurans are famous for leaving things for the last minute so they will go vote when it is 5 minutes to 4:00 pm. In the past the Electoral Tribunal has always extended voting time to 5:00 at least, this time they didn't. Why, because they have great logistics and know who their supporters are so they made sure all of their supporters voted at the earliest possible time, so who do you think was not able to vote because he got to the booth at 4:00 pm? And no, this is not illegal but it is kind of sneaky, and I also know of a few other tricks these guys always make, I'm not saying the other guys play clean but they are not quite as adept as the current president's guys.

Now we have a problem, the Electoral Tribunal argues that it can't give out final numbers because they have to receive the ballot boxes and count them, in the capital Tegucigalpa, because they all come from rural areas, now they were able to receive the forms from 10,000 booths in a few hours on Sunday but these others they have to count? Why? They receive their information via email, and in this country there is cell phone coverage all over, also I think we have one of the highest per capita ownership of cell phone in Latin America, so how come these 7,500 ballot forms can't be emailed?

In the end of course the opposition should win, because unfortunately for the government they have to give copies of the poll booth forms to several international agencies and all parties have access to them ,so I really have no idea why they haven't declared Nasralla President yet.

Do I think Nasralla is going to solve our problems, hell no, he'll probably be as bad as all the others we have had, but I say let's rotate this power thing, having it in the hands of the same people all the time can't be good. Sure anarchy would be the answer to some people, but in fact Honduras is as close to anarchism as any country in the world so that isn't the solution either.